The Sculpture Garden in Winter Is Its Own Exhibition

Most visitors know the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden as a summer place, all green lawns and wedding parties posing at the spoon. But the 11-acre park at 725 Vineland Place, a partnership of the Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board that holds more than 60 works, is arguably at its most striking in the season most people skip.

Spoonbridge and Cherry, the Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen fountain built between 1985 and 1988, becomes a different sculpture under fresh snow. The red cherry reads as a single warm note in a white field, the curve of the spoon traced in snow, the whole composition stripped to its essentials. The same goes for the rest of the collection, which ranges from Alexander Calder to recent works by Theaster Gates and Angela Two Stars: pieces that compete with summer crowds in July stand alone in January, isolated and clarified.

Winter changes the light, too. A low sun, long shadows and reflective snow give the same sculptures a different palette every clear afternoon, so even a regular who has walked the loop a hundred times finds the familiar made strange. The art does not change in winter. The quiet around it does.

The Garden is open daily and free, year-round, from 6 a.m. to midnight. In February the crowds thin to almost nothing, and a Lowry Hill resident can stand alone in front of one of the most photographed objects in the state without another camera in sight. The cold does the work of a velvet rope.

There is a real case that the off-season is the best season here. The art is the same; the experience is not. A summer visit is a social event; a winter visit, on a clear day after a snowfall and before the paths are tracked up, is closer to a private viewing, the kind of unhurried looking that sculpture rewards.